No matter which direction they go, there are going to be unhappy people.

Regardless of the above; they're still going to make money either way. So it's really win-win for Apple.

Sure the existing Apple enthusiasts believe that their self important needs dictate the success or failure of Apple. The bottom line is that for every person who is unhappy with a release schedule or lack of one; there are millions of people more than happy to trample over them and hand over their cash the next Apple product.

I don't think the current mini is superior enough to the nexus 7 to justify the increased price.

/flamesuit

I could agree with you in some respects, but we have been looking at the 7" devives for work and all the 16:9 screens make them useless for writing emails, the Galaxy Tab 2 7" you get if your lucky 2 lines of text if that in landscape

However with the 4:3 of the iPad mini you get more screen for doing emails etc.

I was looking to buy a mini but now I know the update is "around the corner" I will wait and see what it brings, hopefully Retina with the A6X chip.

There just milking people for there money i have just got my ipad 4 about 6 weeks ago and now its going to be outdated by apples new ipads its just getting to much and to stupid to keep realising new ipads with out any major change so what ipad 4 is twice as fast as ipad 3 it doesnt matter no app uses all of the ipad 4 processor power.

Your iPad 4 won't be outdated, just like my iPad 3 isn't outdated. You're right that no app uses all of the processing power - that's why this isn't a big deal. It still works just as well as the day you bought it.

it seems to me that Apple wants to sell their ios devices as much as they can while the going is good. No real inovation being done for their phones, ipads, ipod anymore...they keep circling between different designs and looks. No real feature has been seen for a long time now. Although im a big Apple product user, i do not like this thinner, lighter faster(which is no where near as fast as other competing products) crap...
Even their computers dont offer the most high end hardware...I bought a 2 year old galaxy nexus to get accustomed to the android OS, and that OS and hardware was as fast my iphone5. And the nexus had WAayyy more features.

i can only imagine what the current gen Android phones offer.

Please don't feed the trolls. If we are going to play the anecdote game let me add to this game. My friend dropped the iPhone 4S for a Note 2 4 months ago. Now she has complete buyers remorse because she bought the Note II because her fandroid friends told this tech illiterate girl that Apple was dying because Jobs was gone and all her favorite apps were going to be prioritized for Android which is complete BS. Well after sitting her down and showing her hard evidence of the health of the Apple Ecosystem she shouts "Ugh I hate this stupid phone and I have a contract on it." So hooray for anecdotes. Personally I think it's a tad ridiculous for apple to speed up their launches but that is just me.

There just milking people for there money i have just got my ipad 4 about 6 weeks ago and now its going to be outdated by apples new ipads its just getting to much and to stupid to keep realising new ipads with out any major change so what ipad 4 is twice as fast as ipad 3 it doesnt matter no app uses all of the ipad 4 processor power.

Nope, they are just 'milking' the idiots that purchase every single generation even though they don't have a need to.

They are settled, but the asynchronous schedule of the iPhone and iPad necessitated the intermediate launch in the fall last year. The reason was the transition to the Lightning connector in the iPhone 5.

If Apple wouldn't have updated the iPad with the connector, they would have had a dip in sales, because people would wait with their purchase of an iPad until the Lightning version would be released.

The relatively high price for the iPad mini also makes sense, because Apple can now include a retina display without increasing the price. The only thing affected would be the margin.

There just milking people for there money i have just got my ipad 4 about 6 weeks ago and now its going to be outdated by apples new ipads its just getting to much and to stupid to keep realising new ipads with out any major change so what ipad 4 is twice as fast as ipad 3 it doesnt matter no app uses all of the ipad 4 processor power.

I've got some advice for you: Always wait for the next model of any tech product before buying. You know it's always going to be better/cheaper than the last one. Just think of all the money you will save by not buying anything at all, ever!

__________________

*The season starts too early and finishes too late and there are too many games in between.

Name me one thing the ipad 4 can do which the iPad 3 cannot do. One thing.

It's not outdated if it has the full iOS functionality. This, in my opinion, is jealousy.

The fact there is a new iPad out that is newer than the ipad 4 then this means that the ipad 4 is out dated by ipad 5 and when you say 'Name me one thing the ipad 4 can do which the iPad 3 cannot do. One thing.' that proves my point of the fact that they are milking us for money. may be i elaborated about the outdated thing in a unclear way but still im not going to by a iPad 3 when i know there is a ipad 4 around just for the sake of saying "Name me one thing the ipad 4 can do which the iPad 3 cannot do. One thing."

I fell for this BS on the iPad4. Partly because my iPhone 4 died and I had to get a new one, so I got the iPhone 5. Then, I didn't want to maintain a set of 30pin cables/peripherals and another set of lighting ones for the iPhone 5. And I refused to pay Apple's freakin' insane adaptor cost of $29 that should have been included when they made the switch.

So, I unloaded all my iPad2 stuff at a loss and bought the iPad4. Truth be told, although the retina screen is nice and it's snappier... the benefits were not worth the loss I took. Granted, I'm glad I don't have to maintain two sets of cables etc. but all the reviewers and Apple sites like this one who just went on raving and raving about how much better the new one was... were just blowing Apple's marketing smoke.

I'm knee deep in Apple products so it's not likely I'll just leave the platform... but it feels a lot less pleasant to be an Apple "lemming" these days. Fool me once Apple...

they will lose so many customers if they keep releasing ipads every 5-6 months until now you knew your device would atleast be the newest for atleast 1 year.... now this just sucks

I used to feel like this. I bought an iPad mini a few months ago and I couldn't love it any more than I do now. I don't mind if they put out a newer one in March. If I like it, I'll buy it and sell the old one. That's the great thing about Apple products: their resale value. It's one of the main reason everything I own is Apple-branded.

If the mini gen 2 releases in March with a faster processor...no problem. I'll happily skip it and wait a while longer for the next version.

If they put a retina display in the Mini in March, I (and pretty much everyone else who got a mini) will be really upset.

I understand that the mini will be outdated at some point. I'm fine with that. Mine will continue to work great. But, putting a retina display in it, just 4 months after releasing the first generation? That's a flat out middle finger to your customers. If they were planning on doing this, they should have waited until February or so to announce the Mini at all instead of making one generation that will have very limited resale value and putting a major upgrade more or less immediately after introducing a new product.

A mini with an A6 is cool, and some people would upgrade, some wouldn't. But change the entire display this quickly? ugh.

I didn't get the outrage over the iPad 4 upgrade because it was just a speed bump...no major deal. But imagine if the iPad 3 were released 4 months after the original iPad....that's the equivalent to the mini getting a retina display in March.

For ages people have been saying Apple's yearly cycle couldn't compete with the constant barrage of new Android phones and tablets.

Apple seems to have responded (although not as far as the iPhone is concerned - possibly due to them primarily being sold on contract?)

I'm not sure it's a good move. It's better to release when you have something great worth releasing, not when the planet reaches some arbitrary position around the Sun. Maybe Apple do have something genuinely worth a new iPad model.

Seeing that the constant Android releases are pretty minor "upgrades" I don't see why Apple has to wait until something mind blowing is ready either. If you have improvements, just release them immediately (once a few are ready) rather than holding them off for some big marketing event so you can show tons of improvements all at once.

This type of release schedule has already hit the software market with benefits for both the consumer and the provider. I welcome this change for hardware as well.